November is the month of the year when we see a profusion of men growing moustaches, proudly sharing their pictures and enthusiastically encouraging their friends to join the movement. This “Movember” craze is organized every year to raise awareness and funds for men’s health, essentially cancer-related diseases. What started as a pretext among friends in…

Disappointing, frustrating, surprising, uninspiring, exciting, amazing… Depending on how you experienced the 2014 FIFA World Cup, which team you were supporting or how much of a die-hard fan you consider yourself to be, this is how you would probably describe the games that ended on July 13. Without delving into the details of which team…

The digital revolution and the ubiquitous presence of the internet, social media and new communication technologies has profoundly altered traditional forms of education and is undeniably shaping a new educational landscape. The conventional schooling system now needs to reinvent itself in order to adapt to a situation where students have instant access to news, information…

As part of their communication efforts, companies have used and abused actors, athletes and celebrities as brand ambassadors who endorse and become the face of their brands. The pairings of George Clooney with Nespresso, Roger Federer with Gillette or Haifa Wehbe with Pepsi come to mind. Over the years, another profile of ambassadors emerged. Companies…

The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” One could easily argue that in this statement George Bernard Shaw aptly described the affliction of the world of corporate communication for the longest time. Communication is the exchange of information between people. Yet most companies have left out the word…

Those of us living in Lebanon can’t but notice the recent profusion of ads featuring celebrities promoting different causes: actors and athletes encouraging people to drive carefully, well-known female figures supporting breast cancer awareness month and singers vowing to protect the environment. More recently, local corporate brands seem to have jumped on the bandwagon, with…

Lebanese democracy, which the international media had long lauded as a rarity in the Middle East, is now being mourned in the aftermath of the decision to extend the Parliament’s mandate last month. With an already five point decline in our ranking on the Democracy Index and a regression in our score on freedom in…

Whether the Parliamentary elections do take place on time or in several months, we are most certainly entering “election season”. This will mean an even bigger flurry of political programming with politicians vying for airtime and media exposure. After all, it is through media that they can reach out to their constituencies and state their…

Khouloud Sukkariyeh and Nidal Darwish, two seemingly ordinary people in love, became overnight the poster children for the fight to legalize civil marriage in Lebanon, an uphill fight the positive outcome of which is still far from assured. Travel agencies, the clergy and even the municipalities of Nicosia and Larnaca can feel safe knowing that…

As we finish the season of giving and head into the new year, perhaps it is time for the business world to consider its own commitments to society and take so-called corporate social responsibility (CSR) more seriously. The Arab world has jumped on the CSR bandwagon in recent years, with countless conferences, summits and publications…